On a rare break from the road over the summer, Live for Live Music caught up with Umphrey’s McGee keyboard player Joel Cummins over the phone while he enjoyed the Cubs beating the Cardinals and playing his new keyboard from his home in Venice, California.
After celebrating their 2000th show in November of last year, 2015 has been another banner year for the band. They released a landmark album, The London Sessions, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, sold out numerous shows, from the Beacon Theatre in New York to Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, and are gearing up for a four-night run down the east coast with Lettuce.
Last year, the band started their own record label, Nothing Too Fancy Music. So far, the label has released two studio albums: Similar Skin and The London Sessions. However, there are no current plans to release other bands’ albums on the label, at least for now.
“The main reason that we started the label was to put out whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted,” Cummins said. “Both Kevin Browning and Vince Iwinski, our co-managers, and their plates are completely full at this point with everything about Umphrey’s McGee.”
“So there’s something to be said about needing to take care of number one first. We’re not trying to start a label with the goal of creating it into a huge player in the music industry. This is more for us, at least at this point.”
Cummins added that, with the difficulty of selling albums in the current industry climate, their best use of time and resources was to focus on Umphrey’s McGee themselves as opposed to worrying about other bands.
“Though I don’t know what foolish band would want to release their album out on our label,” Cummins said in jest. “Talk about a death knell.”
As the band’s fall tour schedule is released, fans have quickly realized that the band is performing a relatively lighter slate than usual.
“More than anything, it’s looking at how many shows we’re going to play per year. We really wanted to get that number down below 95, and we’re going to accomplish that this year,” Cummins said. “More than anything, it’s the simple factor that a few people have some weddings, we’ve got another member of the family on the way with one of the band members, that’s something we want to give them a month off to really be able to focus on that and be a good parent.”
He went on to say, “It’s great to be able to look at things and manage them in a way that makes sense for everyone’s personal lives as well as moving forward as a band and an entity that we want to keep growing.”
While this upcoming run with Lettuce features the band playing larger venues than they did last summer, it wasn’t necessarily a cognizant decision to play bigger sites.
“Every market is kind of its own thing and with both Lettuce and us on the same bill, we’re obviously drawing from somewhat similar fan bases, but there are fans that really like Lettuce that don’t know Umphrey’s McGee and fans of Umphrey’s McGee that don’t know Lettuce,” Cummins said. “It’s kind of a cool cross-pollination thing that has worked out well in the past for us.”
Umphrey’s McGee and Lettuce will tour together from July 16th through 19th, including shows in Asbury Park, NJ on July 17th and Philadelphia, PA on July 18th. Break Science will be playing an after party on the 18th as well!
“Whether it’s with STS9 or The Disco Biscuits too, we’re in a fortunate phase in our career where 90 percent of what we’re doing is going in the right direction and we’re able to go into some bigger places and at the same time, there are opportunities to do a multi-night stand in a smaller room.”
Cummins would go on to reference the band’s upcoming three-night run in Charleston, South Carolina, dubbed “The Chucktown Ball,” where the band is playing three-nights at the relatively smaller Music Farm in Charleston.
“Whenever we can, we try and play venues that we have a really good chance of selling out, because you are going to get a little more energy in the room. It creates a little bit more demand the next time you come out,” Cummins said.
While the band tries to sell out every show, some of the most memorable set lists for long-time fans of the band come in undersold rooms on weeknights. Cummins attributes this to which band member writes the set.
“On any given night, [bassist Ryan] Stasik is kind of known for the wackiest setlists out there,” Cummins said. “A lot of times there will be some obscure songs, sometimes it will be really heavy stuff. I’m kind of known for trying to cherry-pick some of the obscurities and find those diamonds in the rough and trying to get more improv into the show. And Brendan [Bayliss] is all about trying to make a show with no holes and creative segues.”
“There’s something to be said that if we’re playing an obscure market and there’s some really die-hard fans that have come out there and some local people on a Wednesday, we want to play some things that make people say, ‘Damn, I should’ve gone to the show on Wednesday.’”
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As the band’s catalog has grown, some songs have made their way in and out of the band’s regular rotation. Set list stalwarts such as “Roulette,” “The Crooked One,” “Mullet (Over)” and many more have seen fewer and fewer appearances.
“There’s a lot of songs from the 2003-2007 era that I’m actively trying to put more back into set lists now,” Cummins said. “We’ve played ‘The Linear’ and ‘Puppet String’ so many times in the past three years that almost everybody who’s come to a show has seen that at least two or three times.”
“However, there’s a lot of people who discovered us from 2003 to 2007, when we were playing a song like ‘The Crooked One’ every third show and now we’re only playing that five times a year and we’re starting to get people asking us to play songs like ‘The Crooked One’ or ‘Words’ or ‘Mullet (Over).’ Things that were popular in the rotation back then but because we like to lean on newer material and play our newer songs.”
Using “The Crooked One” as an example, Cummins talked about how the band has written numerous heavier songs, which has led to fewer plays of the song in favor of “Educated Guess,” “Hindsight” and other new, heavier songs.
“One of the things we try to do with our set lists is not play a set of all really heavy songs,” Cummins said. “People like the variety that we might be able to play something that’s a little bit dancier or a little bit more vocal oriented, right next to a song like ‘DBK [Der Bluten Kat].’”
One tool the band uses to add variety to their sets is the website allthings.umphreys.com, which is a comprehensive database of the bands setlists. Using its filtering tools, Cummins is able to figure out which songs have been played when and where to give fans different shows every time they come out in the same city.
“For these next shows, for Boston and probably Providence and I might include the Casino Ballroom in New Hampshire and look and see what songs have we played the most, what songs haven’t we played at all in this region in the past two years,” Cummins said. He then gave the example of how someone pointed out to him that the band had not played “Hurt Bird Bath” in Boston since 2003.
Another thing the band tries to do is keep the creations from the “Raw Stewage” quarter of their annual UMBowl event alive in their rotation.
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“We try to keep those alive in our live rotation because: A. We know that fans voted for them and they already like them and B. It’s a new way of trying to write original music,” Cummins said. “We’ve taken these things that were improvisation and tried to arrange them that make sense as a song. It’s always good to have different ways to have songwriting happen.”
With a history between Lettuce and Umphrey’s McGee, fans can expect to see sit-ins throughout the course of the run, particularly with the horn section.
“We’ve known the Lettuce guys now for a long time, probably starting with things like Jam Cruise and festivals,” Cummins said. “So being able to play with them like we did in St. Augustine, and have a couple nights where it’s just us and we could let loose. And then we did a late-night jam thing together, that was really fun for everyone.
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“I have a feeling that the spirit of that is going to continue and you’re going to see some pretty interesting collaborations. You know we love to do stuff with horns, so I could definitely see that being something that happens at least multiple times over the course of the run.”
Cummins and the rest of Umphrey’s McGee begin their tour with Lettuce at the Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on Thursday, July 16.